Staytus is the open source publishing platform that I developed last year when we needed something simple to help us communicate with our customers when issues arise with our service.

In this blog post, I'm going to fully explain how to get Staytus up and running on an Ubuntu 16.04 server. This post contains everything you need to know to be up and running in less than 10 minutes. To begin, you'll need a server running Ubuntu 16.04.

For this tutorial, we're going to assume that you're logged into your server as an unprivileged user with access to run commands as root using sudo.

Installing pre-requisites

The main things you need are Ruby (for actually running the app), Node.js (to help with javascript compilation) and MySQL (as the backend database). Let's start by getting them installed.

You'll be prompted to choose a password for your root MySQL user. Choose something secure and make a note of it, you'll be needing it shortly.

Creating your database

All the data that Staytus generates will be stored in your database. We'll go ahead and create a database and a user in your MySQL database. Get yourself a MySQL console and run the queries below. You'll be prompted to enter your root password that you entered in the previous password.

You'll now be able to access your installation without adding the :8787 port suffix.

Note: if you have other sites installed on this server, you may not wish to change the default vhost above. In these cases, you will need to adjust your nginx configuration as appropriate.

Configuring outgoing e-mail

Staytus is able to send e-mails automatically. You'll just need to setup and add the appropriate SMTP server details to your application. Open up your environment.yml and add the appropriate SMTP credentials.

You can use any SMTP compatible mail service for this, whether it's running on your server or externally.

If you make changes to your database & environment configuration files you will need to restart Staytus. You can do this using sudo -u staytus procodile restart from the /opt/staytus/staytus directory.

Upgrading

Upgrading your installation is quite a simple task. To upgrade, just follow these steps.

A little bit about the author

Adam is the managing director at aTech Media. A software developer & designer by trade specialising in Ruby & Rails ‑ with over 130 open source repos. When not computer‑ing, Adam enjoys a bit of baking, Formula 1 and playing FlightSim.

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